The Tell-Tale Heart

A) Author:

-He was born in 1809, in Boston.
-His parents died before he was three years old.
-Edgar Allan Poe married his thirteen years old cousin.
-He started to drink alcohol more often after his wife died in 1847.

B) Plot:

The story of the Tell-Tale Heart his about a man, the narrator, who's obsessed by an old man's white eye. He is so obsess that he decides to kill the old man. For seven nights he watched the old man sleeping but the "evil eye" was closed. The night after, the old man wakes up in the middle of the night asking "Who's there?". The other man in the room waited patiently for the old man to lie down in the bed but it didn't happened. He then open a little crevice in his lantern and sees the evil eye. He jumps on the old man an kills him.

After the murder, he puts the body under the floor and clean up everything. At four o'clock in the morning, three police officers knocked on the door. The murderer invites the officers to take a cup of tea in the old man's room. But he kept hearing the beating of the old man's heart and its driving him crazy so he confess everything.

C) Analysis:

1-Setting(place and time of the story): in the house of an old man where the narrator lives, in the 1840's in The US.
2-Characters: An unnamed narrator who proclaimes that he's sane.
The old man with an evil eye.
The neigbourgh
The three policemen
3-Themes(reader interpretation): I) A human being has a perverse,wicked side - another self -
that can provoke him to doing evil things without an
apparent motive.

II) Fear of discovery can bring about discovery.

III) The evil within is worse than the evil without.


4-Point of view : First person narrative.
5-Sentence style : "Obect there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the man..." - Sentences are like the beating of a heart.
6-Figures of speech
-Anaphora (repetition): I heard things in Heaven
I heard things in Hell
-Personification (gives human features to objects or animals): Death becomes a person.
-Simile (comparison using the word "like"): "A single ray of light like the thread of a spider."
-Alliteration (repetition of sounds)
-Irony: "I was never kinder to the old man during the week before I killed him."